Jackie as Editor

Biographer Greg Lawrence focuses on the later years of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her love of books, her career as an editor at Viking and Doubleday, her dealings with authors and co-workers, and more generally, of course, her life as an American icon. His book is essentially an oral history compiled from interviews with those authors, co-workers, and collaborators. Narrator Bernadette Dunne so inhabits these voices, especially the signature breathy whisper of Jackie herself, that one forgets the authorial intermediary. An inescapable weakness of the text is the laudatory tone everyone seems to have in their recollections of Jackie--her graciousness, her erudition, her dedication to the most mundane of editorial chores. Often the narratives seem repetitive in tone and character--oddly, like a series of book blurbs. Even so, this title--interesting, revealing, full of indelible Jackie "moments"--tells more about her glamorous and complicated life than many standard biographies. D.A.W. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

October 18, 2010
Charting Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's impressive legacy as an editor at Viking and Doubleday, Lawrence draws on a wealth of sources, including interviews with more than 125 of her former publishing collaborators, and hundreds of notes left to the author by Onassis. He was also one of her authors, co-writing three books with his former wife, ballerina Gelsey Kirkland (including the controversial bestseller Dancing on My Grave). Onassis learned the hard lessons of editing early on: from Barbara Chase-Riboud, author of the novel Sally Hemings, that the best authors are those willing to be edited, and from Michael Jackson, the frustration of working with an enigmatic celebrity. This Onassis appreciation appears almost simultaneously with William Kuhn's misleadingly titled Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books, and while both will appeal primarily to publishing and media insiders, Lawrence's perceptive, impressively researched, book is the better of the two, presenting a woman with "a grand spirit of adventure and... a sense of irony about life that served as a kind of armor" for this courageous, gifted woman. 8 pages of b&w photos.

Starred review from May 1, 2011

New York Times best-selling author Lawrence (Dancing on My Grave), whose last three books were edited by the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, here homes in on Onassis's 19-year career as an editor, at Viking and Doubleday. While previous biographies have credited the former First Lady as being influential in the arts, literary and otherwise, Lawrence's work gives audiences an in-depth view of the authors and books personally championed by Onassis, whose literary tastes were impeccable. Bernadette Dunne's (see Behind the Mike, LJ 5/15/09) sterling narration brings the work to life. Recommended for those interested in Kennedy and/or celebrity biographies as well as for anyone curious about the behind-the-scenes process at large publishing houses. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/10; the Griffin: St. Martin's pb will publish in July 2011.--Ed.]--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

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